Neural-network-based adaptive hybrid-reflectance model for 3-D surface reconstruction

This paper proposes a novel neural-network-based adaptive hybrid-reflectance three-dimensional (3-D) surface reconstruction model. The neural network automatically combines the diffuse and specular components into a hybrid model. The proposed model considers the characteristics of each point and the variant albedo to prevent the reconstructed surface from being distorted. The neural network inputs are the pixel values of the two-dimensional images to be reconstructed. The normal vectors of the surface can then be obtained from the output of the neural network after supervised learning, where the illuminant direction does not have to be known in advance. Finally, the obtained normal vectors are applied to enforce integrability when reconstructing 3-D objects. Facial images and images of other general objects were used to test the proposed approach. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed neural-network-based adaptive hybrid-reflectance model can be successfully applied to objects generally, and perform 3-D surface reconstruction better than some existing approaches.     

Efficient and automatic plane detection approach for 3-D rock mass point clouds

The detection of planar regions from three-dimensional (3-D) laser scanning point clouds has become more and more significant in many scientific fields, including 3-D reconstruction, augmented reality and analysis of discontinuities. In rock engineering, planes extracted from rock mass point clouds are the foundational step to build 3-D numerical models of rock mass, which is significant in analysis of rock stability. In the past, several approaches have been proposed for detecting planes from TLS point clouds. However, these methods have difficulties in processing rock points because of the uniqueness of rock. This paper introduces a novel and efficient method for plane detection from 3-D rock mass point clouds. Firstly, after filtering the raw point clouds of rock mass acquired through laser scanning, the point cloud is split into some small voxels according to the specified resolution. Then, for the purpose of acquisition of high-quality growth units, an accurate coplanarity test process is used in each voxel. Meanwhile, the accurate neighborhood information can be built according to the result of coplanarity test. Finally, small voxels are clustered into a completed plane by region growing and the procedure of postprecessing. The performance of this method was tested in one icosahedron point cloud and three rock mass point clouds. Compared with the existing methods, the results demonstrate superior performance of our method in the field of plane detection.

     

An adaptive normal estimation method for scanned point clouds with sharp features

Normal estimation is an essential task for scanned point clouds in various CAD/CAM applications. Many existing methods are unable to reliably estimate normals for points around sharp features since the neighborhood employed for the normal estimation would enclose points belonging to different surface patches across the sharp feature. To address this challenging issue, a robust normal estimation method is developed in order to effectively establish a proper neighborhood for each point in the scanned point cloud. In particular, for a point near sharp features, an anisotropic neighborhood is formed to only enclose neighboring points located on the same surface patch as the point. Neighboring points on the other surface patches are discarded. The developed method has been demonstrated to be robust towards noise and outliers in the scanned point cloud and capable of dealing with sparse point clouds. Some parameters are involved in the developed method. An automatic procedure is devised to adaptively evaluate the values of these parameters according to the varying local geometry. Numerous case studies using both synthetic and measured point cloud data have been carried out to compare the reliability and robustness of the proposed method against various existing methods.     

An approach to combine progressively captured point clouds for BIM update

Building information models (BIMs) provide opportunities to serve as an information repository to store and deliver as-built information. Since a building is not always constructed exactly as the design information specifies, there will be discrepancies between a BIM created in the design phase (called as-designed BIM) and the as-built conditions. Point clouds captured by laser scans can be used as a reference to update an as-designed BIM into an as-built BIM (i.e., the BIM that captures the as-built information). Occlusions and construction progress prevent a laser scan performed at a single point in time to capture a complete view of building components. Progressively scanning a building during the construction phase and combining the progressively captured point cloud data together can provide the geometric information missing in the point cloud data captured previously. However, combining all point cloud data will result in large file sizes and might not always guarantee additional building component information. This paper provides the details of an approach developed to help engineers decide on which progressively captured point cloud data to combine in order to get more geometric information and eliminate large file sizes due to redundant point clouds.     

Stratification approach for 3-D euclidean reconstruction of nonrigid objects from uncalibrated image sequences.

This paper addresses the problem of 3-D reconstruction of nonrigid objects from uncalibrated image sequences. Under the assumption of affine camera and that the nonrigid object is composed of a rigid part and a deformation part, we propose a stratification approach to recover the structure of nonrigid objects by first reconstructing the structure in affine space and then upgrading it to the Euclidean space. The novelty and main features of the method lies in several aspects. First, we propose a deformation weight constraint to the problem and prove the invariability between the recovered structure and shape bases under this constraint. The constraint was not observed by previous studies. Second, we propose a constrained power factorization algorithm to recover the deformation structure in affine space. The algorithm overcomes some limitations of a previous singular-value-decomposition-based method. It can even work with missing data in the tracking matrix. Third, we propose to separate the rigid features from the deformation ones in 3-D affine space, which makes the detection more accurate and robust. The stratification matrix is estimated from the rigid features, which may relax the influence of large tracking errors in the deformation part. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and real sequences validate the proposed method and show improvements over existing solutions.     

Automatic segmentation of point clouds from multi-view reconstruction using graph-cut

In multi-view reconstruction systems, the recovered point cloud often consists of numerous unwanted background points. We propose a graph-cut based method for automatically segmenting point clouds from multi-view reconstruction. Based on the observation that the object of interest is likely to be central to the intended multi-view images, our method requires no user interaction except two roughly estimated parameters of objects covering in the central area of images. The proposed segmentation process is carried out in two steps: first, we build a weighted graph whose nodes represent points and edges that connect each point to its k-nearest neighbors. The potentials of each point being object and background are estimated according to distances between its projections in images and the corresponding image centers. The pairwise potentials between each point and its neighbors are computed according to their positions, colors and normals. Graph-cut optimization is then used to find the initial binary segmentation of object and background points. Second, to refine the initial segmentation, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are created from the color and density features of points in object and background classes, respectively. The potentials of each point being object and background are re-calculated based on the learned GMMs. The graph is updated and the segmentation of point clouds is improved by graph-cut optimization. The second step is iterated until convergence. Our method requires no manual labeling points and employs available information of point clouds from multi-view systems. We test the approach on real-world data generated by multi-view reconstruction systems.     

Statistical process monitoring approach for high-density point clouds

Statistical process control (SPC) methods have been extensively applied to monitor the quality performance of manufacturing processes to quickly detect and correct out-of-control conditions. As sensor and measurement technologies advance, there is a continual need to adapt and refine SPC methods to effectively and efficiently use these new data-sets. One of the most state-of-the-art dimensional measurement technologies currently being implemented in industry is the 3D laser scanner, which rapidly provides millions of data points to represent an entire manufactured part’s surface. Consequently, this data has a great potential to detect unexpected faults, i.e., faults that are not captured by measuring a small number of predefined dimensions. However, in order for this potential to be realized, SPC methods capable of handling these large data-sets need to be developed. This paper presents an approach to performing SPC using point clouds obtained through a 3D laser scanner. The proposed approach transforms high-dimensional point clouds into linear profiles through the use of Q–Q plots, which can be monitored by well established profile monitoring techniques. In this paper point clouds are simulated to determine the performance of the proposed approach under varying fault scenarios. In addition, experimental studies were performed to determine the effectiveness of the proposed approach using actual point cloud data. The results of these experiments show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the monitoring capabilities for manufacturing parts that are characterized by complex surface geometries.     

Complete residential urban area reconstruction from dense aerial LiDAR point clouds

We present an automatic system to reconstruct 3D urban models for residential areas from aerial LiDAR scans. The key difference between downtown area modeling and residential area modeling is that the latter usually contains rich vegetation. Thus, we propose a robust classification algorithm that effectively classifies LiDAR points into trees, buildings, and ground. The classification algorithm adopts an energy minimization scheme based on the 2.5D characteristic of building structures: buildings are composed of opaque skyward roof surfaces and vertical walls, making the interior of building structures invisible to laser scans; in contrast, trees do not possess such characteristic and thus point samples can exist underneath tree crowns. Once the point cloud is successfully classified, our system reconstructs buildings and trees respectively, resulting in a hybrid model representing the 3D urban reality of residential areas.     

Splat-based surface reconstruction from defect-laden point sets

We introduce a method for surface reconstruction from point sets that is able to cope with noise and outliers. First, a splat-based representation is computed from the point set. A robust local 3D RANSAC-based procedure is used to filter the point set for outliers, then a local jet surface – a low-degree surface approximation – is fitted to the inliers. Second, we extract the reconstructed surface in the form of a surface triangle mesh through Delaunay refinement. The Delaunay refinement meshing approach requires computing intersections between line segment queries and the surface to be meshed. In the present case, intersection queries are solved from the set of splats through a 1D RANSAC procedure.     

3-D reconstruction from tomographic data using 2-D active contours.

Reconstructing three-dimensional (3-D) shapes of structures like internal organs from tomographic data is an important problem in medical imaging. Various forms of the deformable surface model have been proposed to tackle it, but they are either computationally expensive or limited to tubular shapes. In this paper a 3-D reconstruction mechanism that requires only 2-D deformations is proposed. Advantages of the proposed model include that it is conformable to any 3-D shape, efficient, and highly parallelizable. Most importantly, it requires from the user an initial 2-D contour on only one of the tomograph slices to start with. Experimental results are shown to illustrate the performance of the model.     

An effective quad-dominant meshing method for unorganized point clouds

To perform quad meshing on raw point clouds, existing algorithms usually require a time-consuming parameterization or Voronoi space partition process. In this paper, we propose an effective method to generate quad-dominant meshes directly from unorganized point clouds. In the proposed method, we first apply Marinov’s curvature tensor optimization to the input point cloud to reduce the umbilical regions in order to obtain a smooth curvature tensor. We then propose an efficient marching scheme to extract the curvature lines with controllable density from the point cloud. Finally, we apply a specialized K-Dimension (KD) tree structure, which converts the nearest neighbor searching problem into a sorting problem, to efficiently estimate the intersections of curvature lines and recover the topology of the quad-dominant meshes. We have tested the proposed method on different point clouds. Our results show that the proposed method produces good quality meshes with high computational efficiency and low memory requirement.     

Registration of point clouds using sample-sphere and adaptive distance restriction

Registration of point clouds is a fundamental problem in shape acquisition and shape modeling. In this paper, a?novel technique, the sample-sphere method, is proposed to register a pair of point clouds in arbitrary initial positions. This method roughly aligns point clouds by matching pairs of triplets of points, which are approximately congruent under rigid transformation. For a given triplet of points, this method can find all its approximately congruent triplets in O(knlog?n) time, where n is the number of points in the point cloud, and k is a constant depending only on a given tolerance to the rotation error. By employing the techniques of wide bases and largest common point set (LCP), our method is resilient to noise and outliers. Another contribution of this paper is proposing an adaptive distance restriction to improve ICP (iterative closest point) algorithm, which is a classical method to refine rough alignments. With this restriction, the improved ICP is able to reject unreasonable corresponding point pairs during each iteration, so it can precisely align the point clouds which have large non-overlapping regions.     

Multiframe image point matching and 3-d surface reconstruction

This paper presents two new methods, the Joint Moment Method (JMM) and the Window Variance Method (WVM), for image matching and 3-D object surface reconstruction using multiple perspective views. The viewing positions and orientations for these perspective views are known a priori, as is usually the case for such applications as robotics and industrial vision as well as close range photogrammetry. Like the conventional two-frame correlation method, the JMM and WVM require finding the extrema of 1-D curves, which are proved to theoretically approach a delta function exponentially as the number of frames increases for the JMM and are much sharper than the two-frame correlation function for both the JMM and the WVM, even when the image point to be matched cannot be easily distinguished from some of the other points. The theoretical findings have been supported by simulations. It is also proved that JMM and WVM are not sensitive to certain radiometric effects. If the same window size is used, the computational complexity for the proposed methods is about n - 1 times that for the two-frame method where n is the number of frames. Simulation results show that the JMM and WVM require smaller windows than the two-frame correlation method with better accuracy, and therefore may even be more computationally feasible than the latter since the computational complexity increases quadratically as a function of the window size.     

A topological approach for surface reconstruction from sample points

Most algorithms for surface reconstruction from sample points rely on computationally demanding operations to derive the reconstruction. In this paper we introduce an innovative approach for generating 3D piecewise linear approximations from sample points that relies strongly on topological information, thus reducing the computational cost and numerical instabilities typically associated with geometric computations. Discrete Morse theory provides the basis for a topological framework that supports a robust reconstruction algorithm capable of handling multiple components and has low computational cost. We describe the proposed approach and introduce the reconstruction algorithm, called TSR – topological surface reconstructor. Some reconstruction results are presented and the performance of TSR is compared with that of other reconstruction approaches for some standard point sets.     

Error-guided adaptive Fourier-based surface reconstruction

In this paper, we propose to combine Kazhdan’s FFT-based approach to surface reconstruction from oriented points with adaptive subdivision and partition of unity blending techniques. This removes the main drawback of the FFT-based approach which is a high memory consumption for geometrically complex datasets. This allows us to achieve a higher reconstruction accuracy compared with the original global approach. Furthermore, our reconstruction process is guided by a global error control accomplished by computing the Hausdorff distance of selected input samples to intermediate reconstructions. The advantages of our surface reconstruction method also include a more robust surface restoration in regions where the surface folds back to itself.